The American Conservative

The American Conservative: The Magazine for Thinking Conservatives is published by The American Conservative. This magazine focuses on Social and Political issues in all aspects of morality and conservatism.

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Articles from Vol. 10, No. 4, April

Beltway brigadier Robert Kagan is all wrong.WASHINGTON'S BIPARTISAN foreignpolicy elite is worried. Neocons, liberal interventionists, and conservative hawks are all fretting about the specter of "isolationism" in the Tea Party. Facing a plucky band...

WASHINGTON'S BIPARTISAN foreign-policy elite is worried. Neocons, liberal interventionists, and conservative hawks are all fretting about the specter of "isolationism" in the Tea Party. Facing a plucky band of freshmen congressmen who have expressed...

Meet the heterodox economists challenging globalism."I DON'T CARE who writes a nation's laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks." So said one of the greatest textbook writers of them all, Paul Samuelson.But even...

"I DON'T CARE who writes a nation's laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks." So said one of the greatest textbook writers of them all, Paul Samuelson. But even Samuelson didn't live forever--he died in 2009...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When the Huffington Post website put out its shingle in 2005, Twitter was just a glimmer in the eye of a California programmer, and social-networking behemoth Facebook had just 1 percent of the users it does today. A sustainable...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These days I care more about the results of local sporting events than I do national or out-of-state elections, but I was pleased that Golden Staters put Jerry Brown back in the governor's chair. Brown's austere unhipness...

American arms pacified Fallujah - and may have poisoned a generation.IN THIS YEAR'S State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared, "the Iraq war is coming to end" - at least for Americans, leaving "with their heads held high" because "our...

IN THIS YEAR'S State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared, "the Iraq war is coming to end"--at least for Americans, leaving "with their heads held high" because "our commitment has been kept." For millions of Iraqis, however, the...

The back-and-forth response of the United States government to the growing crisis in North Africa has resulted in the usual finger pointing, this time in search of whom to blame for the failure to predict developments. A major shake-up in the intelligence...

Inflation, austerity, or debt repudiation awaits America.COULD THE U.S. default on its national debt? That the question is even being asked should give us pause. A few years ago, the idea of the federal government failing to repay what it owed investors...

COULD THE U.S. default on its national debt? That the question is even being asked should give us pause. A few years ago, the idea of the federal government failing to repay what it owed investors seemed like a prospect so farfetched as not to be worth...

WHEN A NATION fights for its life, ideology goes by the board. General Washington danced a jig when he heard King Louis XVI had become a fighting ally in our Revolutionary War against the Mother of Parliaments. In our Civil War, Abraham Lincoln...

Today's turmoil in the Middle East looks more Like the stillborn revolutions of 1848.THE UPRISING IN EGYPT and challenge to the Middle East's autocratic rulers could have produced a sense of déjà vu for the late German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt....

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT and challenge to the Middle East's autocratic rulers could have produced a sense of deja vu for the late German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Notwithstanding her reputation as a progressive thinker, Arendt believed that the...

Every year around this time, Hollywood celebrates itself with heavily promoted award shows. The stars preen and praise each other for their courage in bringing to the screen high-minded and serious stories about neurotic ballerinas ("Black Swan"),...

Everything Old Is Neo Again [The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009, Irving Kristoi, Basic Books, 416 pages]WHAT IS a neoconservative?From the etymology of the word, it should refer either to someone who has newly become conservative...

Egyptians revolted against American rule as well as Mubarak's.THE MIDEAST house of cards so laboriously constructed by Washington over the past four decades threatens to collapse. One can't help but be reminded of the revolts across Eastern Europe in...

THE MIDEAST house of cards so laboriously constructed by Washington over the past four decades threatens to collapse. One can't help but be reminded of the revolts across Eastern Europe in 1989 that began the fall of the Soviet Empire. Now it may...

LAVENDER MENACERegarding your piece on CPAC ("CPACs Social War," March 2011) you take swipes left and right at conservatives you don't like. You conclude by saying "Attacking Ron Paul and his supporters for their fiscal conservatism won't help Gary Bauer...

Anti-tax leader Grover Norquist confronts the economics of war.CONSERVATIVES WERE STARTING TO WONDER IF THEIR NATIONAL-SECURITY HANDS, WHO WERE PREDOMINANTLY NEOCONSERVATIVE IN THEIR VIEWS, REALLY KNEW WHATTHEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.FOR OVER 25 YEARS, Grover...

FOR OVER 25 YEARS, Grover Norquist has been holding the line on taxes while working to keep together a sometimes fractious conservative movement. It's not uncommon to see him moderating noisy, bagel-filled meetings of disparate single-issue groups,...

Triumphant Israel need cut no deals with Palestinians -which spells disaster for the Jewish State.ON THE NIGHT OF JAN. 28, as revolutionary crowds began to shake the foundations of the Mubarak regime, a friend on the occupied West Bank sent out an e-mail....

ON THE NIGHT OF JAN. 28, as revolutionary crowds began to shake the foundations of the Mubarak regime, a friend on the occupied West Bank sent out an e-mail. He had spent the day in a Ramallah cafe with Palestinians, who cheered each time the Al-Jazeera...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When a supermarket's decision to put a modesty shield over a magazine cover featuring Elton John, his male lover, and their surrogate baby attracted a fierce back lash from the usual suspects--liberal busybodies, professional...

When a supermarket's decision to put a modesty shield over a magazine cover featuring Elton John, his male lover, and their surrogate baby attracted a fierce backlash from the usual suspects - liberal busybodies, professional gay militants, publicity...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In recent months the ghosts of cultural Marxism past, present, and future have haunted the U.S. military. If our soldiers, sailors, and Marines are not frightened by them, the rest of us should be. Together, they are assaulting...

Shakespeare at Liberty[Shakespeare's Freedom, Stephen Greenblatt, University of Chicago, 144 pages]WHEN I SAW the title of Stephen Greenblatt's new book, I wondered: what paradoxical sense of freedom is he going to use in order to attribute it to Shakespeare?...

On Bravo's hit show, the gender roles are as artificial as the spray-on tans.NEW YEAR'S EVE celebrations on television are as old as the medium itself, and just as predictable, right down to the still-annual use of Dick Clark as a presenter. The holiday,...

NEW YEAR'S EVE celebrations on television are as old as the medium itself, and just as predictable, right down to the still-annual use of Dick Clark as a presenter. The holiday, for all its scripted debauchery, is still an occasion when people take...

The back-and-forth response of the United States government to the growing crisis in North Africa has resulted in the usual finger pointing, this time in search of whom to blame for the failure to predict developments. A major shake-up in the intelligence...

The Wealth Explosion [Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, Deirdre H. McCloskey, University of Chicago, 571 pages]FOR MOST OF HISTORY, existence was a grind, at least for the vast majority - though a short grind, for dying...

Several writers in these pages have urged restrictions on trade with China and other protectionist measures, claiming these would produce large numbers of American jobs. Although they make compelling arguments, they ignore key reasons for job losses...

Warrior for Peace [Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America, David Talbot, Simon 6 Schuster, ISl pages]SMEDLEY BUTLER was a real hero of the Old Republic. He served with distinction in the Marine Corps for more than 30 years, rose...